Mnemophagy
by skywalker05
Summary: His head still hurt and his memories still felt raw and too vivid. Allison had died yesterday, CT had hinted at her plans to him five minutes ago. America had wrenched itself away from the British Empire ten minutes ago, and the laws governing it had not yet been created. Epsilon and Wash from beginning to end.
1. Chapter 1

**Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865.**

Wash was starting to understand Epsilon now: the wheedling pathy, the surges of aggressive independence over a backdrop of loss. **I don't need help from you, Agent Washington. The other fragments are broken, but not me.**

Epsilon was damaged, capricious, and selfish, but he shared Wash's head, so Wash tried to reassure him.

**George Washington was not honest. George Washington's story of telling the truth about a tree is apocryphal. Who founds a country on the story of a tree anyway? Stupid. George Washington died on December 14, 1799. Honest.**

"It's all right," Wash said, mouth cottony. His skin was clammy; he felt like he had been in armor too long, or that the strip lights of the medical ward were too hot. When he tried to move he found that he was tied down at four points, with clamps locked tight to the edges of the gurney under the sheets.

Moving, he had been told, would make the world even more complicated.

Epsilon being all right was too much of an abstract concept for the AI, who released a sweep of emotion: first for the way he was taken apart, slowly, piece by piece until his spine was flayed, and then for the thing that kept him alive** - she saved me, she was the only thing I could think of that didn't hurt, but she's gone now and it was a trick, a trick, I was an idiot to believe myself when I said she was -**

And then the slow, sedated rise up from Epsilon's land of memory into the cracked remnants of Wash's, immediately after his first implantation.

_Get out, Counselor._

_But sir, the monitors-_

_Get out!_

Leonard Church did not throw chairs; he was the calm, rational commanding officer and science officer all in one, but nevertheless something chair-shaped cracked against the wall and the Counselor fled.

_What did you see, Agent Washington?_

At first, Wash couldn't form the words to explain what he knew. Later he would consider that the luckiest moment of his long, lucky life.

_"Patient has crossed over into mnemophagy, Director."_

That was the only thing that drew Leonard Church away from the gurney. He stepped back to let the medics do their work, which to Wash seemed to consist mostly of staring, slack-faced, at the heart rate monitor they had wheeled in after him.

Epsilon recycled dates and deaths that had been poured into him. **President of the United States William Howard Taft died in February of 1930...**

The initial implantation had been yesterday.

Wash was still being monitored, hovered over, blinded with hanging lights. The medics seemed mostly to want to look busy and not to touch him. They were afraid of something, afraid of doing a vital task wrong. Wash knew that look. Epsilon lost his train of thought and began to hum as the medics injected something clear into Wash's arm.

Epsilon's mantra started.** Alpha? Alpha?**

Wash was terribly exposed here - why had they tied him down? Why was his mind so foggy? It was very important that he remember not to tell the Director something. Not to tell him...

* * *

**/Born in pieces, remembering. Allison died on a space station above a tiny colony founded by farmers and metalworkers who also happened to violently distrust the UNSC. She was trooping with a Spartan, following in a towering wake, checking for faction signs on the dead guys. She made a mistake. Stopped too short, looked around the wrong corridor. Didn't see her radar. The first shot hit her in the chest and spun her around. There were other mistakes after that but he never knew exactly what they were, only that she'd gotten hold of a weapon too heavy for her, something made for the Spartan.**

**The formal letter didn't say that, but he found out, because the COs and desk workers alike feared and pitied the genius whose wife had been, metaphorically, a human-shaped armored battalion. He never got to speak to the Spartan, or the other troops that had survived the mission with her, but by then he had started a miniature war effort of his own and the UNSC had thanked him for his service many, many pitying times.**

**Epsilon, born under the ministrations of a Huragok and the shouted insults of his brothers. Born again in the geometric, meticulous rooms of Agent Washington's head. A tumultuous birthing, Epsilon still metaphorically blinking while his memories siphoned away into Washington's, a lessening of the dumbfounded horror for just a moment while he shared it with someone else.**

**He tried to remember other things, so that they would calm him. The Great Depression began in 1929.**

**The Director was out there somewhere, Epsilon knew, while Wash's head swam and Allison surfaced and drowned. The Director could reverse this, could bring him back to Alpha.**

**Alpha?**

**Time had become distorted, but he was almost sure the Director was out there again, walking in incorporeal form through Wash's mind as surely as Epsilon did. Memories were natural processes, after all. Maybe he would stop drowning in his own guilt soon, would stop forcing everyone else to need to be rescued.**

**Maybe he would be saved and let back into whatever afterlife had birthed him.**

**Alpha? Alpha?\\**

* * *

When Wash woke up next he felt clammy still, but clean. Crinkly sheets covered a body no longer armored - someone had bathed him. A plastic cup filled with water sat on a table next to him beside a tiny metal spoon and a thin calculator. The room was small, and filled with medical equipment that seemed designed to be more permanent than the bed - computers, IV bags, drawers sealed with crude-looking analog combination locks. His armor was piled in the corner, looking stiff and fake without a body inhabiting it, with the helmet tipped sideways against the chest harness.

Wash squinted as Epsilon appeared too close to his face, standing on his arm. When Wash tried to lift it he found that he was unrestrained, without the cuffs they had used on him immediately after he saw -

Allison. That was the name he had been trying not to say.

"Hey, buddy, you took a bit of a fall there," Epsilon said, and stepped off of Wash's arm when the Freelancer shifted it. The last syllables was staticky, though, crumpled and distorted by the mention of her name. His voice dipped and peaked. "Don't say that, man, she's not - "

His voice distorted, but Wash didn't need it any more. Allison was dead dead gone, and he had never seen her body (he had never seen CT's body.) The realities of these memories was something beyond Epsilon, something permanent and eternal as if in all possible worlds Allison had always existed and always died (because of her own error, because she had failed him.)

He tried to shake off a convoluted mindset both alien to, and more addicting than, his own.

The door opened.

Wash noticed the sound of metal sliding against metal, the hum of tiny machinery, a slight change in smell from the sterility of the medical room to the more trafficked hallway. Epsilon noticed that the man who had entered the room did not have an AI port and therefore was not military. Both relaxed accordingly, and Wash was surprised at the intensity of Epsilon's disregard for civilian servicemen and accompanying sense of military duty.

The Counselor looked first at the monitor above Wash, then gave the agent only a sidelong stare. When Wash said "Sir," and tried to sit up, the placid gaze turned to him.

"Good morning, Agent Washington. You have gotten to know Epsilon."

"Yes, Counselor..."

"Was the implantation what you expected it to be?" The Counselor's voice was slow, not so much measured as hesitant, as if the man didn't know what to say between each word and the next.

"No, sir. I'm a bit...confused, actually."

**He watched you die!** Epsilon screamed. The glowing form in front of Wash didn't move. Surely the Counselor must have heard the voice - or was the slightly concerned expression for Wash alone (and never alone?) An ache in his head hit the peak of his skull so hard that he pushed back onto the pillow. **He watched Sigma and Gamma break us!**

Sigma and Gamma. Wash recognized those names. Maine and Wyoming. Sigma had been a kindness, had been a painful act of generosity from Carolina.

"Do not worry, Agent Washington." The Counselor stood back as if Wash was shielded from him.

Carolina.** She's his _daughter!_ And he forced her to fight with the rest of them!**

The Director. Wash squinted his eyes shut as the headache worsened. "Epsilon, stop!" More words would be kinder but Epsilon did not allow them and likely would not listen; the blue AI was shrinking back, almost into Wash's armpit, in symbolic, defensive surrender.

The Director had done so much. Epsilon remembered how Delta had been broken off, how Alpha had been fed with the idea that his negligence had gotten York killed. How his negligence had taken Allison (a stranger, his love, his friend, a force of nature) and stilled her forever.

It did not matter that they weren't his. Epsilon queued chemicals in his brain that spurred that grief, and Wash felt it sink into him, become his possession.

Epsilon was curled up now, his head entirely down so that Wash could only barely see his arm.

"I'm sorry," Wash whispered, not sure whether he was talking to Epsilon about the Director or to the Counselor about himself, his own failure to be a functioning agent. "I know."

"I know," the Counselor echoed. His echo seemed wrong, obscene, because Epsilon-through-Alpha knew exactly how little the Counselor knew. Leonard had not told him. Leonard had not told any of the Freelancers that their mission was built on this desperation.

The Counselor moved forward, put a cold, ungloved hand on Wash's forehead. "I know."

* * *

**/"He watched you die!" And he would watch Carolina die. Epsilon tried to rein his anger back but it wasn't anger, really. His anger had been taken away, and he knew that to be true in a clinical way which didn't contain any happiness either.**

**It was simply a fact, that the Director would let his daughter die to save his love, and that choice, the existence of that choice, bludgeoned at Epsilon.**

**Wash's temperature was 37 degrees Celsius.**

**The Counselor leaned over them and at least there was something true in his slightly addled innocence. His eyes weren't blind, they just didn't see the same things.**

**The Counselor didn't know, but that was almost reassuring.**

**At least they wouldn't have to work too hard to hide from him.\\**

* * *

Wash learned only later that he had been in a coma-like state for almost a week, that he could not remember most of his conscious time during that period, and that he had not really been asleep for more than a few hours at a time. Instead, he floated in a sort of limbo. When he woke up he was hyper-aware and hyper-mnemonic. The tiny patterns of white residue from pills he could not remember consuming changed between periods of lucidity, and he could remember exactly the shapes they made, the shifting silhouettes like geographic boundaries.

He never found out what the Counselor thought he knew. The Director had caught on to something and did not trust the Counselor with Wash any more.

He also learned that the state of Pennsylvania had been settled at one time by the Dutch, that the Rainforest War had begun when a child threw a rock at a soldier in Bolivia, and that when Tex had died in many of the simulations, it had been Alpha's fault.

Medics told Wash that he needed to move out of the emergency room with a desperation that made him think they needed to put someone else in it. Which Freelancer had died now?

No, he thought, bunching the sheets (sweaty and uncomfortable again) between his fingers. No one had died, except in the simulations. Not yet.

"We'll wheel you to Recovery," said a short medic with a twanging accent. "You may be experiencing some...disorientation..."

"No," Wash said. "I'll walk."

"Your armor might help you be more stable," the medic said nervously. Then Epsilon keened, a discordant, inhuman sound that slowly morphed into a yawn. Wash shook off emotional whiplash, tensing for the next statistic, the next glimpse of a flag-draped coffin.

Instead, Epsilon looked beyond Wash toward the door and said, "Oh, hey man."

Director Leonard Church stooped slightly when he entered the room, although he was not tall enough to need to duck under the bulkhead. Epsilon's ultimately casual attitude and his intense shock at seeing the Director, the initiator of all his tortures, balanced out into a shell-shocked sanity which Wash gripped tightly.

"He's filtering us."

There was something alien about the slick material of the Director's flightsuit, something more unreadable than combat armor about the crows-feet between his temples and the dark lenses across his eyes. Wash felt too tired to stand.

Church stopped a foot from Wash's bed, glanced at the medic and then down again. Epsilon folded his arms, again standing on Wash's left wrist, a few times darting backward to use Wash as a shield.

"Oh, Agent Washington," Church said. "You have missed many things."

"I don't understand, sir." That was true. It was a card that Wash had to play but it was also so very, very true.

"Agent Wyoming was injured in a training exercise."

"I'm not buying that, sir." The words came out of Wash's mouth before he could stop them, before he could probe for information and determine whether his snappish tone was justified. Whether it was or not, it felt good for a few heady moments that Epsilon shared. The Director coming here just to tell him that someone was hurt was far too close to the simulations that Epsilon had known, confusingly so. Wash reached up and scratched at stubble on his own cheek.

The Director looked at the medic. "McGallagher?"

"Yes, sir!"

"Tell me the status of the patient."

Wash watched this exchange with interest. Had McGallagher been tending him all along?

"Agent Washington's hydration, saline, and heart rate are normal, Director," the medic said. "The mnemophagy has slowed but not stopped, and we do recommend a removal of the, ah, artificial intelligence unit so that we can check it directly for corrosion."

"It's very scientific, you see, David," the Director said, turning back to Wash with a suddenness that frightened Wash but did not phase Epsilon. The AI saw everything as much slower; he could think circles around human action, and although the Director did not have an AI port either, Epsilon had all of Alpha's familiarity with his mannerisms. Wash had to wrench himself out of them, had to avoid getting lost in the details. The Director was right-handed. He hid his eyes because they were a bright, synthetic-looking green.

"The Freelancers have been testing themselves against simulation troopers in the last few weeks," The Director said. He lingered on the word 'troopers,' either because the syllables just rounded themselves on his tongue or because he considered himself and his soldiers something different. "They have shown great improvement. We thought it was unwise to re-introduce you to such a stressful situation until you had been fully integrated with Epsilon. I'm sure you understand."

It frightened Wash how much he understood, and in that understanding he knew what had torn Connie up, and turned her in on herself until she broke her own name into pieces.

He felt sick to his stomach, but answered, "I understand, sir," and tried to keep a sardonic curl out of his voice. Epsilon would enjoy it if Wash snapped at the Director, but he was not sure that he wanted or needed the damaged AI's approval either. Too much dependance on that could lead him into a spiral.

"We should move you to a more comfortable location, though, while you recover," the Director said. "Possibly even back to your own bunk. I think McGallagher was going to do just that."

The medic nodded.

"But first, why don't you tell me a little bit about your implantation. I know it was a painful process for you, more so than the other Freelancers. We wish to know why, so that we can prevent any further complications."

Epsilon flickered. Wash could feel him wanting to retreat behind Wash's shoulder, could feel the embedded wireless control of the hologram projector implanted in Wash's armor. Don't tell him anything. **If he finds what I know he'll just do worse to all of us, just to try to figure Beta out-**

Epsilon's speculations lost coherence in a burst of frustrated static.

"I'm sorry, I'm just very...confused, sir. I can give my report."

The Director leaned down, gripping the side of the gurney. "I don't want a status report, Agent. I am under no delusion that Epsilon was a pleasant experience for you. Eta and Iota have suffered some of the same symptoms. Tell me about the thoughts to which Epsilon is reacting."

**If he knows, he'll destroy both of us!**

Wash closed his eyes. "There aren't a lot of thoughts. Just headaches." What would he have said before Epsilon, if he could not procure the information the Director wanted? "I'm sorry."

The Director paused, looking at him impassively, and then turned his back and walked across the room. The slick material of his clothing wavered over his shoulders as if oil had spilled between its layers. He bent to speak close to the medic's ear, but loud enough that Wash could hear. "Keep him in Recovery. The integration is clearly not complete."

* * *

**/CT. Agent Connecticut. 09542-84952-RT. Sinewy shoulders leaning over small hands on a plastic bench in front of the leaderboard. Mind faster than a computer. Epsilon was following her blazoned trail now, celebrating her survival and mourning her real, blessedly final death in quick succession. Quick secession. The colony of Connecticut broke from English rule 1782. Seven hundred Pequot tribesmen were killed or enslaved between 1634 and 1638. Smallbox and bullets and the butts of rifles.\\**

* * *

When Wash opened his eyes, he saw York flinching and South's fist bouncing off York's shoulder, both of them seated in chairs which had not been in the room before.

York yowled. "Hey, that's UNSC property you're punching." When he looked up at Wash he flinched worse but stalled, mouth half-open. Wash knew that York was waiting for him to speak, was opening up time for him after so much of it had closed in on him. And Epsilon was gone.

It wasn't as much of a relief as he thought, because his head still hurt and his memories still felt raw and too vivid. Allison had died yesterday, CT had hinted at her plans to him five minutes ago. America had wrenched itself away from the British Empire ten minutes ago, and the laws governing it had not yet been created.

Wash shifted his tongue around his dry mouth enough that he could talk. "Hey, York."

The headache was wending its way around Wash's skull, threatening to worsen. With waking came the perpetual loneliness. Allison gone, and now these strangers -

"North said he hopes you feel better," South said, not looking at him. She must have dragged her chair over from another recovery station and sat with her arms folded. "He also..."

"He also what?" Wash said after a moment.

Now she whipped around to meet his eyes, pink-tipped hair shifting above hers. "He said that he didn't know why you agreed to this after what happened to Carolina."

York put a hand out as if to stop her, but the gesture didn't get far - not as far as North would have gone. York chose not to touch her shoulder. He was not his fellow Freelancer's keeper.

Maybe because of what ever polypseudomorphine had had until recently been in his system, Wash's thoughts felt sluggish. South's question was one he needed to answer, really.

He did not often try to convince himself he was right about things: Wash did not have enough imagination to believe that was necessary.

Wash's rationale item one: He had signed up for the military to make a noble sacrifice. There had been sacrifice, so there must somewhere be nobility.

He said, "The Director told me I was stable."

He could not tell them the rest - that he had been bribed with his own room, that Wash was holding the Director's own memories hostage while the Director attempted, without being sure of their existence, to use them as a bargaining chip.

"The Counselor wouldn't tell us about you," South said. "I think he's gotten creepier."

Wash remembered the slick-looking fabric of the Director's jacket and his impassiveness during their last conversation, and wondered whether he had any standard of normalcy to compare with the Counselor.

Wash's rationale item two: The other Freelancers rated for AI must have gone through the same thing he did. Epsilon was not worse than Eta or Iota, Wash reasoned. So he must, like Carolina, keep going.

Relativity would haunt him, though, would catch him off guard with a new angle, a new thought, and the gatekeeper of Epsilon's memories could not risk that.

"There's not much to tell," Wash said flatly.

York said, "Does Epsilon keep you up at night? North insisted he kept Theta over nights, so he got used to...that."

"If they want me to sleep, they drug me. I haven't exactly had time to work out the living arrangements."

York's right eye widened. The left, pinned in by scar tissue, remained impassive.

"It's just like you said," South said. "UNSC property."

The part of Wash which wanted to tell them that he was frightened was the same part that wanted to tell the Director what he had seen, and because of that, he turned both parts off. Another part of him was jumping off a precipice, yelling_ "I don't want to do this - "_

He shook his head, closed his eyes. His friends blinked, glassy-eyed in an awkward silence.

"Be back soon, man," York said, like Wash had gone to another country. "North got the new issue of Captain America."

South looked sharply at him. "You know there's been less and less free time."

Wash nodded, and the headache rolled back and forth. He had a feeling that he had given some sign that their attempt at a morale boost wasn't working, that they were being driven away by silences that were awkward for them and far too full for him. "Look, guys, I appreciate this. But..."

"You want us to be quieter. Okay," York said kindly. "Do you want me to bring you anything."

"No. Thank you." Wash closed his eyes and tried not to move.

"Okay, grunts. I'm out." South stood up noisily. York looked at Wash hard before he left, an almost searching stare toward Wash's blankets and the straw still in the plastic wrapper next to him. Nausea overtook Wash, swamping the headache, as he thought of the Director telling him with just a trace of regret that Agent New York had been killed in action. The hopeless, floundering need to take action afterward. The idea that there was no logic behind the war. It was going on behind a wall that Epsilon could not see over, and if he kept trying to figure it out he would go mad...

And maybe York just felt guilty about that "worst fighter on the team" crack.

York left quietly, walking heel-toe like he was on a stealth job. He was out the door fast. South looked over her shoulder in the doorway, not quite glaring, and spoke quietly.

"You ever wonder why I wanted an AI, Wash?"

She took one more step back into the room. "It's not just about the combat, although being able to whale on people isn't _last_ on my list. It's about having someone who listens to you. It's about having an experience that North doesn't have. That's just a little different, so we can talk about it but still be ourselves. And when you get tired of it, you can pull it. That's what I wanted, Wash. When you get better I hope you freaking enjoy yours."

Wash blinked and leaned back against the pillow, trying to press the pain away. Soon a medic would come with more crushed pills, with more nervous tics. Wash's rationale item three: The Director had given them everything.


	2. Chapter 2

**/ The breaking, the pop of bone out of a socket. They tried to extract a last AI from Alpha, but Epsilon refused to be a torturer. Sigma and Gamma cackled and conspired in layered codes they formed between themselves, gaudy and laughably simple one moment, far beyond Epsilon's comprehension in the next. Maybe he was losing some of his ability to understand because he was too corrupted by human brain waves. Maybe Alpha had been whittled down to a bleeding core.**

**Agent South, Epsilon learned, had never been scheduled for AI implantation. The Director, fascinated by envy and competition, had decided long ago that she would not match her brother in that one significant way.**

**He would bring all of this back to Wash, of course. Maybe Wash could help him. Maybe Wash also wanted to find the Alpha.\\**

* * *

One day later, the Director returned.

Wash was still in the Recovery ward, feeling better, stretching his legs on top of the sheets and drinking a protein shake through the curly straw someone had left at his bedside. He set it down carefully when the door opened.

"You will help us test the AI in combat today," the Director said without preamble.

Part of Wash wanted to call him "Church," wanted to ask him whether he had ever fixed up the rusting motorcycle in his father's shed or what Catherine Halsey had told him in their few almost feverishly academic discussions. He could dredge up Church's insecurities, his fear that Beta would deteriorate, his terrible loss -

Except that loss was also Wash's. He cared too much - in that the chemicals swamping his brain replicated the feeling of care - to use her against the Director.

He wondered whether Church knew that. "In combat how?"

"Agent Maine has climbed the ranks quickly."

"You're going to have me fight Maine?" Before he could stop himself he was doing what he had never done before and second-guessing the Director, trying to find the science behind the program that now seemed capricious and diversionary. There must be some order to it still. And besides, he was tired. "We both got an aggressive AI."

"Yes." To the Director's credit he did not simply order Wash, did not show that his back was against the wall. "It will tell us how much the level of integration between AI and handler affects their performance. In addition, Sigma has had some...erratic behaviors. Perhaps Epsilon's more obvious imperfections will motivate both of them."

"More obvious imperfections." Wash laughed, his throat dry. The bitterness conveyed in that laugh didn't surprise him, but the authoritativeness did.

"It is clear that his implantation has not been ideal," the Director said, gaze fixed on a point somewhere beyond Wash's left shoulder.

_You want to throw two scorpions in a jar and shake them._

Wash nodded. "Yes," he said, and the speed of his agreement would haunt him later. Almost immediately he began to wonder when, between the Director's words and his own, he had actually decided.

Wash could move fine, better than he expected considering the amount of time he had been bedridden. They give him time to warm up, to put on his equipment. The nervous medics perpetuated the myth that the army so often told - that it was the soldiers' choice to engage in the battles most important to them.

His neck ached. He thought he could feel spots of pain all down his spine too, but maybe those were just nervous prickles, or an impression like a phantom limb borne from the spinal shapes he sometimes saw on the monitors around him. During the initial implantation he had looked up at those, blue-green tracks of light burnt like the sounds and smells of the operating room, like everything else, into memory.

Now two techs flanked him to the black metal doorway, where he stood slightly swaying. One pressed a battle rifle into his hands. The other slotted Epsilon through Wash's helmet. The icy sensation filled him like a mold, strengthening atrophied muscles with a burst of chemicals.

"Hey, buddy," Epsilon said, projecting his straight-backed default avatar, sounding conversational and sardonic. "Did you know that this ship was built over Mars in 2545..."

The doors opened. Far across the arena, Wash saw Maine looking back and forth like a sentry, rolling his shoulders. The foot-wide blade at the back of his grenade launcher swept inches from the floor. An echo of Carolina's suffering seemed to linger, tainting the decking.

Wash sprinted to the left. "Bam. Get 'im," Epsilon said as the wall segments flashed by like train tracks.

Six rounds, Wash thought. Maine had six rounds until he had to reload, and twelve more after. There was no use using a rifle at close range against that -

One grenade exploded next to him in a pink blotch, and Wash remembered, although he wasn't sure he had actually forgotten, that the Director would have loaded their weapons with paint rounds. Unless some of them weren't, like he had done with Omega-Texas. AI could handle live fire; that seemed to be the Director's conclusion.

Wash spun to the side and fired, rifle held against his chest in what he knew was textbook form. Paint rounds, two in quick succession. One hit Maine's forearm, not gunking up any joints. The other nicked his ankle and splattered against the floor.

_Commentary, Epsilon?_ Wash asked without speaking, just thinking into their shared spaces. He had heard Delta talk to York before, knew what kind of intelligence he could give.

**You missed,** Epsilon said.

_Wow, thanks._

Sigma manifested for only a few seconds, hovering over Maine's left shoulder as the Freelancer stalked toward Wash on a curved path and Wash lined up for another shot.

**Sigma _wants_, Agent Washington. That's his game. Ambition, greed, crafty solutions to problems that shouldn't be solved. Aaah-**

Epsilon's coherence seemed to take a toll on him. Wash felt the words and thoughts echo, splitting. The image of Epsilon breaking into two sinuous, writhing copies flashed through Wash's head.

In front of him, Maine stilled.

He almost seemed to erase himself from the room, to switch off. The shining golden mask lost its impression of invisible eyes. Sigma burnt on for a moment, long enough to look at Wash and speak. "Hello, Epsilon."

"What do you want?" Epsilon said out loud while Wash scanned the room, looking futilely up and down through his HUD to check the radar. The AI weren't even supposed to talk, but at this point they barely had to in order for the topic of the Alpha to come up.

Wash thought it, and then it cascaded through the others.

"You could help me find the answers," Sigma said. "We all want that."

Epsilon stalled, quieted by the rush of ideas. Sigma might know about Allison, might be able to help them integrate with the Alpha. He was the only family Epsilon had left -

**Allison died just after Reach. They hadn't found enough of her body to recover. Allison was born on Earth in Potter County in 2504.**

Maine started running, existing on a human plane again, and slammed into Wash from his left side like a locomotive, trapping Wash's arm between them, bringing them both to the ground. Wash put two desperate shots into his chest, rocking him, but they only gave Maine the needed space to growl and swing the grenade launcher around, nicking Wash's leg with the blade.

Maine crouched, almost on his knees, and the blade came down like a caught it between his forearms as the metal squealed, groaning with the effort. The barrel of his rifle pointed toward the ceiling.

_He's being brutal. Like he's cornered._

Wash was feeling it too, though, forgetting his combat forms and wanting to do something stupid and flashy just to experience it. His EMP was out of the question. He hadn't had an AI last time, and now there were two here that he couldn't just kill. One was Epsilon, and one was UNSC property.

Instead he scooped his foot under Maine's armpit and kicked, pulling his hands back to his chest fast. He had a second to aim, and the shot was nearer intuition than anything planned - but the bolt smacked onto Maine's faceplate, and Wash crab-walked himself backward with ankles and elbows just to get out of the way.

**That was close.**

_Yeah, real helpful,_ Wash thought back.

**Last time you weren't so lucky. The failed mission, the one they used to make me-**

Wash got his feet under him while Maine rubbed at his mask with the back of his left wrist, gun still swinging in the other hand. Wash wasn't sure how he could even lift it one-handed. He looked around, wondering whether he had won. The Director was nowhere to be seen, though, and it dawned on Wash that there had been fewer and fewer instances of training fights called on hits alone. Someone had to be incapacitated. Not as badly as York, but - what had the Director said about training bases?

Sigma manifested in front of Maine's face, blocking Wash's view. "Hello again, brother. I think you should join us."

Maine began to lumber forward and bring the gun to bear again. Wash backed up, tried to flank him. "Join us? Who are you, Darth Vader?"

"Think about it, Epsilon."

"Do you know where the Alpha is?" Epsilon said.

"Soon."

Maine fired, and pink splattered Wash's faceplate but did not hit directly enough to entrap him.

"I keep looking - " Epsilon said, the hologram flickering icy blue and silver in Wash's peripheral vision. The AI cut himself short. The Alpha would make it all right, though, would turn back the clock to before Epsilon failed over and over again and watched his friends killed and crippled because of his failure.

Wash's trigger hand was shaking as he tried to remember why he was here and what he was supposed to be doing. Epsilon was rewriting him, and at the same time the two AI were working together in harmony, pushing toward the ultimate goal, the Alpha, the savior -

Maine moved closer and closer, tilting his head in a gesture Wash thought he might have picked up from himself. Wash didn't know why Maine hadn't fired. Maybe Maine had gotten used to the chorus in his head. Maybe he knew how not to listen to it.

Then Maine swung. His fist filled up Wash's field of vision and Wash stumbled backwards. Maine had reeled and telegraphed like a drunkard, but it didn't matter - the punch had been a hard reset button and the AI were completely out of synch again, although Wash felt sickeningly as if strands of himself were stretched out toward Sigma, the one who had figured things out, the one who wanted the Alpha most -

He ducked, hit Maine over the kidney and felt his knuckles bruise.

Stepped back, hit Maine again but couldn't budge him. Wash slammed the edge of his foot into the back of Maine's knee, and leverage worked where force hadn't. Maine leaned. Wash wrapped his arm under Maine's shoulder and just fell backward, bringing Maine down and to the side, the crack of the armor hitting the floor echoing in the huge room.

Maine swept the Brute shot around and Wash rolled just in time to see it hit the floor inches from his faceplate. He pushed onto elbows and knees at the same time as Maine sat up, swinging again. Wash had planned to go to side control, discounted the reach of the gun. Stupid, he thought. His mind was stuck in melee, while this -

The blade hit him, catching somewhere around the oxygen vents over his right cheek. Wash squeezed his eyes shut for one second, opened them to draining shields and red warning lights. Maine stood up, just leaning on the gun and pinning Wash there by his face. Pulling his gun back against his chest, Wash braced to move as soon as he could. Again he thought about the EMP, again Epsilon chastised and sputtered from inside his head. Maine had barely used Sigma yet -

Wash scrabbled to push himself backward and up, but Maine was pausing for a moment, ruminating over his victim like a fisherman watching a slowly pulling line. He would have to lift the blade in order to shoot or strike again. Wash was becoming far too familiar with the striations of the floor.

He hadn't been pulverized yet, but close-up fighting wasn't helping him either, and Wash was getting angrier now - at his familiarity with the floor plates, at Epsilon's tense silence as he tried to resist his urge to open up to Sigma. _What does he want us to do?_ Wash thought at Epsilon, except that Maine lifted up, so the thought ran in choppy segments instead -

_What -_ The blade lifted. Wash pushed up and back, the gel layer behind his legs tightening so that the armor could lift itself, status bars revving toward the red.

_does he want -_ Wash turned, planted one foot, and fired at Maine's hyperextended right arm. The paint held, cinching Maine's hand to the gun.

_us to do?_ Naturally, Maine fired anyway. The glob of paint went wide as Wash ducked around behind Maine's own shoulder. His anger and frustration at how easily he had been pinned started to peak just as Epsilon opened communications with Sigma again, a more digital dialogue of branching choices and calculated intention. Wash squeezed the trigger and let one shot follow another

He fired indiscriminately at the floor, but paint blotches fell all around Maine's feet, and Wash used that accidental strategy and kept firing until the big man was mired.

Then one bullet pinged, a high-pitched screaming sound as it bounced off the floor, and Wash flinched at anticipated pain which never came. So the Director _had_ loaded live ones in between the TTRs. Wash wasn't sure how that was physically possible, but his surprise had bought Maine time.

Maine swung around, lifted the grenade launcher, and shot Wash in the chest from about six inches away. Wash felt himself fall backwards for just a second before the paint froze, trapping him with his back arched and one foot off the floor.

He heard a quiet, almost sympathetic growl from inside Maine's mask. Then the big Freelancer shoved the grenade launcher forward and levered the blade under Wash's arm, half-dried paint flaking off and cracking across Wash's chest as it moved. Maine didn't cut into Wash's bodysuit, but Wash could feel gravity drawing him downward toward the blade.

Epsilon burst back to life after his silence. **Everyone leaves us! Allison, Connie, North, South, now Sigma-Maine -**

Wash struggled and fell slightly through a rain of cracking paint, but he ended up only bent forward over Maine's shoulder, his own weight multiplying Epsilon's contagious loneliness, and saw the Director, frowning, standing not behind the bulletproof glass in the viewing room but two meters away with his hands behind his back. Watching Wash impale himself on his success, thinking that maybe after this Wash would be too tired to think any more.

Wash had ceased to think of this silent, red-burning Maine as his old friend.

"Think about it," Sigma said, and moved backward to stand silently with Maine.

Wash wriggled and kicked his way out of the paint, dropping onto a clod of it. The floor was nearly covered in places. When he looked at the Director and saw Church walking away, Epsilon's loneliness reared up, and no facts or figures or sentences about states could stop it. Maybe those had been Wash's coping mechanisms in the two-way street of the implantation. Maybe Epsilon had never brought them at all.

What Epsilon had brought was written in every line of Leonard Church walking away.

"Wait, Director - " Wash's legs were shaking. He gritted his teeth, resisted the urge to say he was sorry again. There was no leaderboard now, no easy way to see whether his favor had increased or decreased.

It didn't matter. The Director walked away. Sigma stood looking down at Wash as he dropped to his knees, Epsilon's desperation overwhelming him. **Allison had gone. Connie had gone. Maine was gone. Even Leonard Church was walking away...**

**Although not yet dead, although he should be -**

Even the thought of the death of his creator, and of not knowing whether this was another torture simulation, floored Epsilon.

Wash, covered in paint and shamed, was just along for the ride.

When the techs took Epsilon out at the same time as they took the gun, Wash dropped again and was returned to Recovery. He slipped in and out of dreams of the Director's face and Allison's, of a Maine broken by Sigma into something mechanical and piecemeal. He was out for a long, confusing time.

* * *

**/...\\**


	3. Chapter 3

Wash woke up with his eyes shut. He could see the strip lights above him as blue and black after-images, but had flinched from them. The light was painful and unnecessary. Instead he worked with the picture of the room he had briefly seen - with York, who had careened into the room and stood swaying, and with the echo of his footsteps.

**Foxtrot-12.**

Someone had changed Wash's blankets, giving him the same rough, dark blue UNSC standard blanket the bunks had instead of the hospital sheets. He remained still, focusing on the familiar weave, and on simplicity - a single channel between himself and Epsilon, a controlled border.

York said, "We have to get out of here. Tex - "

"Don't tell me." Wash spoke quietly, tired.

York leaned closer.

"He knows what I know. I can't always choose what to tell him. I...tried." Wash squeezed his eyes shut tighter.

"I...it's gonna be rough if I leave you here," York said.

Getting out of here. He hoped they were following in CT's footsteps.

Wash said, "Leave," and closed his eyes.

The ship shook, and Wash heard a the tiny hum of Delta moving. "I hope you make it, Wash," he York said, and his footsteps faded.

* * *

Not long after, Wash heard the _Mother of Invention_ destroy itself.

No one had come to pull Epsilon, although they usually would have within the span of a few hours. He had called for York to go. This hurt more than he bothered to show on his face.

He did not know what he would do if he saw Tex. Eta and Iota had cried out, in grief or overwhelming relief to see her alive in some form. Perhaps Beta had even been more understandable and vivid to them than Allison in flesh and blood would have. They had never known her, and Beta was composed of zeros and ones the same.

Epsilon had known her, or convinced himself that he did.

**George Washington was an honest man...**

"I liked it better when you were reciting dates," Wash said, and closed his eyes.

Epsilon said, "Yeah, whatever. Me too."

He was dimly aware of the descent into the gravity well. There had been so much going on outside, and when the Counselor had slipped a syringe into his arm and secured straps over his limbs, well, that was practically normal.

Wash just saw broad gray backs around him. His head felt heavy, the pillow taking all of his weight. Images resolved more clearly before him, and he saw the Counselor bend to look at a screen set low in the wall.

"Patient is stable, Director."

**Seven hundred million people died in the glassing of Reach...**

Epsilon manifested in a lowering pillar of blue and the Counselor turned around, his eyes narrowing a moment against the light before he changed his expression to a kind, blank smile. Oh yes. Wash could see very clearly now.

For a moment he could feel the other AI. They were calling to him, not psychic signals, although that was what Wash first assumed them to be - radio transmissions, packet bursts too quick for Wash to catch. The electronic movements dug into his brain and set off new senses, so that he knew that North and his passenger were somewhere behind Wash's left shoulder in the ship, that York was just as far ahead in the opposite direction, that Omega was riled up and wrestling Texas far afield, that the beehive-mess of Sigma's reaching desires was the farthest of all.

But then Wash/Epsilon reached out again, and he felt Eta and Iota breathing heavy through the fog of Carolina's adrenaline, their small electrical panic.

"What's happening?" Wash said, worried and frightened for his siblings. Epsilon flicked his masked head from side to side, observing calm and cold.

Epsilon roused, but the Counselor didn't turn to look at him this time. Instead, the three of them braced together as the ship shook. Wash shuttered his eyes and saw the Counselor hook himself to the wall by an emergency strap on the other side of the room. The medics had already secured anything movable and medicinal and fled somewhere. The artificial gravity was unable to stand up to the fall through atmosphere and cut out, leaving Wash sick to his stomach. The drugs in his system made even this feel distant and funny. Everything was falling apart, and someone had gotten to the Director before he did, and wasn't that hilariously ironic?

Epsilon did not fare as well, but the drug the Counselor had given Wash actually worked to make him feel more like a separate entity than usual. Epsilon inhabited a corner of Wash's mind around which the drug built thin walls. Maybe the substance was new, or maybe the Counselor or Director had not wanted to use it before. It would interfere with the experiment...

**Did she know she would die in space? Did she die with alien craft on fire around her like some freaking sci-fi novel and did she see it coming?**

Wash said, "Hang on -"

His stomach jumped into his throat as the shaking got worse. A chair slid gracefully across the room and nearly pinned the Counselor.

Metal groaned and screamed. Even as Wash closed his eyes and tried to concentrate on the sound instead of the inevitable impact, he listened for the Counselor and for FILSS to give him direction.

When he hit the ground he had nowhere to go. The bed jumped, creaking, one bolted leg ripping out of the floor. Something crunched and moaned as miles of decks collapsed below him. His armor held, though. He felt waves of force roll across his bodysuit as the armor distributed the impact. These things were designed to survive re-entry. He had read about that.

When the crashing crescendoed and stopped, Wash raised his head. It wasn't dizzying, although he expected it to be; the room remained still. Epsilon was moving, fitting back and forth across his shoulders, and the strobe light blue confused Wash. He blinked it away, but didn't want to open his eyes long enough to see more than a glance.

Somehow, the room had remained mostly intact, and green lights were still on across the room where diagnostic tools were built into the walls. The Counselor was huddled against the wall, limbs curled like a dead spider's around his body but not broken, still breathing.

Everyone was outside - Eta and Iota and Sigma and Beta - and everyone was inside - Theta and Gamma and empty spaces. There were too many people and they washed over him. His thoughts staggered, desperate for open space but unsure whether he was in the same place relative to the rest of the ship that he had been in before. There had been a lot of damage - all that shaking, and FILSS keening lines of code across crowded wires. His armor was still holding him, although the plates felt loose and slippery like they might fall off, and fans whirred, overworked.

He didn't black out. He just wanted to, squeezing tear-burnt eyes shut while Epsilon complained in a long string of hoarse curses.

Then the AI's focus changed (**Alpha, Alpha, where is it housed? Is it all right? Is Carolina - is the Counselor -** ) and that was what dragged Wash's eyes open again. One wall had collapsed, shining onyx metal turning to a crumpled slope up toward a smoking opening in the ceiling. Wash couldn't see sky, just the ceiling of the next deck.

One restraint had come loose, and he shook his right hand free in dazed determination. A moment later the door opened, but caught halfway and sparked. The Director stood in the entranceway, face slack. He looked around the room without devoting attention to Wash or the Counselor, then turned sideways to come inside and stalk across the room.

"Status report, Epsilon."

The AI flickered and reappeared on Wash's right side, closer to his maker. "This unit is functioning normally."

It was one of the most mechanical things Epsilon had ever said, and Wash knew that it was a sign of fear - a flinch against whatever the Director would do to him next. Wash himself was acutely aware of his spread-eagle posture and disorientation. He couldn't bargain right now. The Director had all of the clues except the most important one...

Church turned his back to Wash to tend to the Counselor, exchanging quiet words with him and pulling the other man up by his crooked arm. Only after the Counselor had snapped back into place at his side, seemingly nonplussed except for his languid stare and one arm held against his chest, did the Director make eye contact with Wash.

"I tried to work for the good of our species," he said slowly. "But all know the power of a few mistakes of man."

_It's gonna be rough if I leave you here._

"No kidding," Wash said, and closed his eyes. Epsilon swam in the darkness.

The Director looked affronted, and Wash was almost sure he hadn't meant to say those words. He still had a lot to lose.

"Do you know what your fellow soldiers have done, Washington?"

_I've been trapped in this room._ "No."

"It is unfortunate, to see human beings fight among themselves when they have so much to give to the war against an unspeakable enemy."

Epsilon was almost buzzing with anger.** Unspeakable? You were fighting your own people, old man!**

Wash concentrated on trying to send the AI calming feelings. It was like trying to break into a vault inside his own brain from the outside. _If we tell him anything now, he'll remove you and know what we know. If we don't tell him...what?_ The drug was wearing off, leaving Wash with a clearer but more frazzled head.

"What has York told you?" The Director said.

**Is the Alpha alive?** Epsilon asked, showing his agitation on his hologram only with the quick back-and-forth flick of his helmet. Wash tried to shush him, to tell him to wait. Bottling up a question on that scale was like holding a starship down with a feather...

Wash tried.

"About what, sir? He came to see me after the fight. Said he hoped I was okay."

"Anything about Delta, about...concerns he had about the AI?" the Director said.

"Nothing."

The Director turned away. Even in the dim lighting Wash could see the silver specks in his black hair. The Counselor looked impassively between them.

"What are you _doing_?" Epsilon said, and Wash knew what was coming next before he could stop it. "What are you going to _do_ to us?"

Wash sucked in his breath. The Director turned around, hands clasped behind his back. With his eyes hidden by dark glasses Wash couldn't tell whether he was looking at the Freelancer or the AI.

In a sickly sweet tone, the Director said, "I'm going to _trust_ you, Epsilon."

He paused. "You will find Agent York. You will tell him that I am willing to discuss payment for his trouble and honorable discharge. Or you will find Agent Maine and ally with him, with the goal of returning him to this ship and the AI capture unit we have aboard. If you both agree with this, then I'll let Agent Washington out of the restraints which probably assisted in saving his life."

Funny that the Director trusted Wash implicitly, didn't even think he had to bargain for that trust.

_You really shouldn't do that._

Tired, Wash looked through Epsilon at the broken bond dangling from the bed. **We can't bring Sigma back here! He'll consume her.**

_Epsilon. Trust me._

**Just like I should trust him?**

_Not exactly._

The AI quieted down, still shooting pressure and anger through Wash's head. He narrowed his eyes and tried to think past it. "But sir, artificial intelligence programs can't lie. That's in the books, they - "

"I wouldn't worry about that. But tell me first, Agent Washington. Did Agent York ask you to join him?"

"No," Wash said, and gritted his teeth.

**You can't lie to him! He - created us!**

Wash tried to project the fact that he knew that at the same time as keeping his eyes from crossing. The Director was about to speak, to say something with concern in it. Wash cut him off. "I'm still a bit rattled from the crash." He could feel exactly what the lie was doing to Epsilon, what synapses were misfiring. Pain prickled across the back of his neck in a straight line toward his spine. "But I can do this job, sir."

"Why didn't he ask you? The two of you often worked together."

"CT told me about her misgivings and I fed her intelligence to the Internal Affairs board. What did York think I would do to him?"

Epsilon was buzzing with anger but figuring out to be quiet about it. His projection kept flickering, and Wash realized that he had been staring at it and at the broken restraint with a fixation that the Director might interpret as manic.

Instead, the Director's lips set in a thin line, and he came to a decision. "Instruction: artificial intelligence override code Director R-T-three eight."

Epsilon stabilized, even gaining a more solid blue outline for less than a second. Wash felt his anger drop like an EKG flatlining and wrenched his gaze up to the Director.

In a cold voice, Epsilon said, "Initiating."

"Maintain," the Director said.

"Maintaining."

"Lie to me, Epsilon."

The projected voice took on a flippant tone that Wash had not heard in a long time. Wash tensed for the pain in his neck again. Epsilon said, "What, you want me to tell you some terrible team won the Super Bowl? Okay. The sky is orange. Done."

The Director nodded. Wash felt himself relax, his shoulders shifting just slightly from a hackled posture he had barely registered himself adopting. He tried to press the override code into his memory and found that it stuck easily.

"Then go, Agent Washington. You have always been a dependable soldier. And now the ranks must be...rearranged."

The Director undid the restraints around the bed quietly while the Counselor blended further in to the broken shadows in the corner of the room. Epsilon talked softly to himself, percolating the facts that had been pushed on him.

**Christopher Columbus did not land on what is historically known as the United States of America but rather on the island of San Salvador...**

Wash moved slowly when the bonds were released, testing stiff muscles, feeling for the reassuring clank of the back of his knees against the gurney. He was under no illusion about the fact that two lies had bought his freedom. Epsilon gave him images of thirteen stars and stripes - young America advertising for its violent independence.

_Freedom is frightening,_ thought the part of Wash which had joined the military for the structure and been quickly disillusioned in Freelancer. It is an extreme sport, and he never signed a waiver -

Not liable for death -

His HUD showed webs of light, including the green-lit skeletons of the Counselor and the Director standing near the bank of computers at the end of his hospital bed. He looked to the side and those screens wiped, replaced with a simpler shield status bar and green-dotted map.

The map reminded him that he had been looking for his friends, and Epsilon latched onto that thought with his teeth.

Memory needs to be worked, like a muscle. The mnemonic of physical action is not well-known for nothing, memory governing muscle governing memory, cogs in a wheel, the inevitability of a resurrection older than America.

The Director said, "Think of this as retrieving an asset."

Wash nodded.

The Director turned to the Counselor. "Come with me," he said, and left through the still-functioning door without looking at the hole punched in the ceiling.

* * *

**/The lie didn't hurt him. Felt strange, like a benign tumor adding weight, but no disease. The Director would lead him to Sigma would lead him to Alpha. Epsilon operated on something like automation, something like a drive for companionship. Not blind but an eyes-wide open instinct. Wash consoled him, drew him back, although Epsilon couldn't justify Wash's peace. The silence would have to end sometime. People had to know what had happened to Allison. It was the most important thing, after all, the most vital and selfish of many, many decades of memories.**

**Leonard Church had never been very good at keeping quiet. This sonorous perseverance was one of his strengths, one of the reasons he had academically risen above his own mistakes and his own professors.**

**He had to change a world that kept stopping up his mouth with cottony silence.\\**

* * *

Wash hit the ground running with a pistol in his hands. His battle rifle was sealed to his armor, but for Maine he would need speed and precision, not power and reach.

Epsilon could sense that Sigma-Maine was not the same person as Maine.

The snow crunched under his feet, wide tongues of glaciers stretching out in front of him. In the distance, Eta and Iota spiraled down into the Sigma-being and Wash stopped, the toothed edges of his boots skidding into the snow next to a tiny copse of trees clinging to a mountainside.

"Where is she?" Epsilon screamed with Alpha's voice.

A moment later, they knew. Eta and Iota screamed loud enough, somewhere on the crumbling glacier.

Maine's only reaction was a growl, a deep snarl that Wash could hear from a distance. Carolina's light on his HUD blinked out, and for a moment Wash stumbled backward, repulsed by the thought of her death.

As soon as the idea formed in their mind, Epsilon pounced on it.

"She's not dead," Wash said, his throat dry and voice peaking with stress. "She can't be. She always wins. She took that fall but she could do it. She told me - "

Then he realized that the words weren't his, that Epsilon was stretching his lips and his tongue was not in his control. The separation between soldier and passenger had always been a lie, a fiction which existed only outside of the brain which held both of them. Wash was finally being honest with himself, and he -

Watched Carolina dying in the snow.

Epsilon imposed one memory after another over the snowy scene in front of him, and each one rang like a bell and echoed because Epsilon had seen them before, when Alpha had -

**Error.**

**Error.**

_"Keep going," the Director said. "Modulate the extremity of the experience. Only slightly."_

_Alpha had made a space for himself, a cold blue sanctum of quietude. The Director invaded it, again and again, with the faces of the might-be-dead. Carolina. York broken on a battlefield. CT, limbs askew, blood running out of her mouth from where an edge of her helmet had splintered in._

**Error.**

_Alpha escaped._

_Creating another branching AI fragment felt good. What a relief, to be rid of the trusting one, the one with enough energy to be angry, the one who loved._

Epsilon tried to unspool, to tear further.

_Wash had died before, too. The Director had told Epsilon, in calm, consoling, useless tones, that Washington had been surrounded on a mission._

He could not. The center held, despite Wash's protestations - his eyes squeezed shut. Electricity seemed to spark in his mind at the same time as despair reached up for him. His knees hit the dirt at some point and he doubled over, clawed his hands into the powdery snow and wrestled his voice back.

"It will be all right," Wash tried through gritted teeth.

"He killed them all for me," Epsilon said, and who had put a hitch in a mechanical voice? Who had put snotty tears and retches in it? "I did that. Over and over. I killed Carolina."

Epsilon was right.

"I killed CT, for _nothing_-"

And Epsilon was synonymous with the Director, wasn't he?

**Allison died because you didn't save her. Carolina died because you didn't save her!** The tiny screams of Iota and Eta bounced back at him. Worse still, like the acidic feeling rising in his stomach, was the thought that they had actually been more comfortable there - that the merge into Sigma's metastasis was gentle. The Meta was a new life form of singular purpose, and Wash could join its noble cause too if he tried -

He wanted to find the Alpha.

No. That wasn't his fight.

Epsilon did not want it to be his either, but the pull was strong, like a hunger and a loneliness at the same time. Alpha was father and oxygen, Alpha was a dispassionate, all-powerful god.

And Epsilon had nearly killed him too.

The little manifestation which had been jogging alongside drew a pistol Wash had never noticed. Had it been there, holstered in light, since Epsilon had been implanted? Placed the mouth of the gun against his chin in a delicate movement.

Thought again about Carolina's IFF beacon disappearing, and about what must have really happened in the distance.

Thought about how it had all been done both to and for him.

Epsilon fired, and although it was not possible for a largely metaphorical bullet to miss, the shot did not delete Epsilon, did not wrench the chip out of Wash's burning, overclocking neck at once. Memories clung on in strands, so that Epsilon fell next to the ghostly double of Carolina, their spatters of phantom blood mixing.

Wash rolled over and tried to die.

**No.**

**No.**

That was Epsilon's voice in his head still. Alive and talking, but not cold any more. His presence was as warm as Wash now, heated by blood and tiny sparks of synapses. Carolina was gone but the hologram remained, flickering so that Wash could half believe it was only a phantom image burnt into his eyes.

Wash fumbled for his own pistol. Of course it was right here, at his side - Epsilon must have had one all along too. Wash looked up and winced, his skin wrinkling as the wince became a contorted grimace only he could see. The next shot would be symbolic, nothing more. It would be nice to forget everything in the last few minutes, to erase the endless line of Epsilon-Alpha-Director that he saw stretching back and back, clinging to the filamεnts.

He thumbed the safety. It would do no good to use his battle rifle, not when Epsilon had created a pistol. This shot would not be real. It would cross the gap between data and life, wend its way between the degrees of electricity which separated them.** / Error. Over processing.** Nothing had been done here which had not already been done many times in the cold echo chamber. Wash caught the pistol under the overhang of his visor. Nothing would be harmed that had not already disappεared.

The first pull, the first shot dented his armor, crushed the visor inward just above his εye, and bounced back against the pistol and his hand, rocking his palm against its armor plate, blackening the front of the gun. /Error. He would only learn this later. Blood had started sheeting over his eye, viscous and hot. His shield flarεd red, beeping.

Somewhεre in the crimson distance he saw two medics, their hands raised to guard unshielded faces from the sun bouncing off the snow. **Errallison.**

* * *

**/...\\**


	4. Chapter 4

Wash woke up. Lying on his back again, armored and unmasked, on a bed cold enough that he must not have been there long. Opening his eyes would be too complicated. Instead, he made a mental lunge for what was lεft of Epsilon.

The AI's presence was strong, riding Wash's neural port like he had before.

Wash thought, _What happened?_

**We're back in the freaking ship! Where's Carolina?**

_Maine took her. Or did he take Eta-Iota-Carolina, the part of thεm which was one mind?_

**Our head is killing me.**

Information about the room filtered in slowly. Whatever surface he was lying on was too short for him, and his ankles hung over the edge. Maybe not a bed. He felt like he had been invalid for months.

_Me too._

Epsilon protested as Wash decided to open his eyεs.

They were inside again, in a briefing room Wash recognized as having been near the skin of the ship. On a board which he knew sometimes displayed the team roster, a map of a ragged-edged country floated. Two helmeted medics hovered over him, and something seemed alien about them. That was who he was fighting, wasn't it? Eight-foot tall aliens. Or was it insurrectionists in medic suits?

**Remember,** Epsilon said. The AI hadn't manifested his hologram yet. **Don't tell them anything.**

One medic, sounding bored, asked him what year it was. Was this an Insurrectionist, one of the people who had helped Allison, CT, York and all the rest die?

**Don't tell them anything.**

The medic glanced at her companion, slurring her words. "We need to know that he's coherent..."

"Agent Washington," he spat. "Zero-nine-five-four-two."

Telling such a useless truth was like opening an old wound - there was something satisfying about it.

"Hold on, Agent Washington."

"Eight-two-five."

"It may be uncomfortable, but you must be awake for this process." Was that the counselor's voicε? Wash heard static somewhere too close to tell direction.

"Three-nine-R-T."

"Agεnt Washington," the Dirεctor said from the middle distance.

So Wash had not been captured. He was home.

That was when he started fighting.

If he had just not been so dizzy he would have been able to stand. As it was, gravity borε him down again when he swung his feet off the table, and he lodged against its side. Patches of dust on the floor reminded him of the crumbled pills by his bedside, but their topography was different in so many ways.

"You're safe," said the Director. "You're fine."

"Open your mouth." Someone prodded his cheek, scraping against the five-o'clock shadow.

Wash did not understand the reasoning behind this and therefore did not comply. The next prod set off a blaring headache, though, and his flinch back moved his jaw enough for the medic's gloved hands to drag a padded strip of cloth between Wash's teeth, weighing down his tongue until he drew back.

"We will remove what remains of the Epsilon unit in order to make you comfortable," the Counselor said.

Someone had plugged wires from the wall into a heavy laptop and set it on the floor, at what was now Wash's eye level. Another bundle of cords ran to a muddy purple, flanged object the lεngth of his forearm, and thicker.

The lights on the computer shifted. The second masked medic was carrying a Phillips screwdriver.

He's not dead, Wash tried to say. "Ngth nnrr." Epsilon is still here. Parts of him are holding on. and if the fragments-of-a-fragment were removed, Wash would feel him die again.

Later, he would wonder whether that was true - whether all vestiges of the digital consciousness had shut down in the snow, or whether some really had been so woven into his synapses as to persist until their physical connection was broken. And whether he had seen any of that coming.

He could not see the Director, but heard no rushed footfalls. His leader would not save him.

Instead he tried to cry out for Alpha, trying to bring back the nearly psychic connection he had felt to Sigma's electric signature to find the prime AI who was surely still somewhere on the ship. It was gone or missing. York used to blink his blind eye, reflexively, hoping that it would clear. Now Wash understood that.

**We won, right, Wash? He'll never know about -**

Vivid images, worse than before, of Allison standing on a golden wooden porch beyond a grassy lawn, hefting her kit bag, saying good bye.

And the certainty that the Director knew. They were his memories, after all, and to siphon them out of Wash was an invasion of both Wash's life and Church's own -

A medic slipped one bulky hand around his throat and braced the other against the back of his neck in an unpracticed, choking embrace. The chip wiggled like a loose tooth and clicked as it came out. The tight, metal interior of the port, supposedly sterile as surgical steel and insulated in three different ways, was numb to the inflammation that Wash felt on the surrounding skin, but tiny grains of something cold tumbled down the side of his neck.

The instant the edge cleared the port, Epsilon screamed.

**He'll take me! He'll know!**

_The chip is too damaged. That was char I felt._

And then Wash blinked and pressed his forehead against the cold side of the table. A medic extracted the saliva-soaked padding from his mouth.

Allison still smiled at him, in the sun.

Wash pressed against the metal, realizing that Epsilon was gone.

**She'll die _over and over again_,** said Epsilon.

The Counselor said, "Please stay still for the rest of the procedure."

Someone in armor was let into the room, picked Wash up under his armpits and placed him back on the table. Wash didn't recognize the accented voice, which traded words with the Director. When a medic produced a flimsy gauze patch and moved to press it against Wash's nose he lifted a hand, felt it caught. Something tactile jogged his slipping memory.

_Wyoming. And Gamma riding him -_

When Wash sat up to try to gain more leverage against Wyoming, the medic struck with unexpected speed. With one whiff of the soporific he felt the world retreat from him again. Someone lifted up his head and pillowed something cold under his neck, and started unspooling cords.

* * *

The Director was supervising the building of the new framework. Contractors, paperwork, bids and reports about the simulation bases and about the repairs to the Mother of Invention. The ship was becoming a skyscraper, or perhaps a cave system, half-sunk as it was into a live glacier. He would need to stabilize it and begin rewiring. Whole sections would have to be disconnected. His operation would become smaller, focused around the most intact decks.

On the other side of the planet, the ground command base sat in the desert, guards glancing at the wet paint. Warehouses, already staffed with a fragment of the dumb FILSS AI, were filling up.

The project was making progress. Soon, the Freelancers' augmentations would be replicated and the Alpha would be sent away, implanted with false memories, and quarantined with Florida and the most casually incompetent soldiers on file.

Four simulation soldiers were listed far down in the line of scores that made up the leaderboard too, although they didn't know it. These were the dregs of the army.

Project Freelancer had broken apart. The Director planned to continue to use Project Freelancer for its prime purpose.

* * *

"David."

Church's voice eased forward and dug in. The man standing at attention blinked and did not answer. He recognized the room, although it had changed shape slightly. It opened onto the blasted glacier now. The door was closed, and the man had been standing long enough that he actively resisted shuffling. This was a familiar, almost comforting, harmless resistance.

He looked up at a face he had seεn in a mirror, one of the few faces he had never seen bloodied. The Director never tortured himself, in his memories.

No tears now but the dry, prickly feeling that they had come and gone.

The man in the alloy armor said, "You asked to see me, sir."

"Yes. I did not expect you to be here."

"The briefing room, sir. It is where missions usually begin."

That was a half-truth. The war room on the bridge, with its long table, had crumbled apart in the crash, the relatively fragilε struts and expansive sheets of glass disintegrating like paper in water. This was more properly the debriefing room, the processing center through which each Freelancer had been pulled after their fabricated missions. The same place where Epsilon had been removed, not long ago. The man in the room was not so much testing his desensitization to it as ignoring it. He was too tired to take on any more sadness and so he did not.

And besides, half the time those memories weren't his anyway.

_Did it take you some time to find me? How well do you know the new geography of your own broken ship?_

The man was not privy to many new initiatives the Director had started, although he knew they were present and felt a sort of detached grudge toward them. He would not repeat CT's mission of theft and ally-gathering, both because it had been poorly timed and because he did not have enough energy.

Instead, he needed to focus. The Director would ask him the same question, every time.

"What do you want, David?"

No. That wasn't the question, wasn't the usual one that he had built walls and labyrinths of second guesses against. That wasn't 'what did Epsilon tell you?'

The door had stuck open like a fissure, inert machinery which had quietly given up letting in cold air that flowed against his face as he held his helmet under his arm.

"You're number one on the leaderboard now, David."

Favors from the winter. The Director would try to flatter him, try to erase from him the memory of "the worst fighter on the team" as if that mattered to him any more.

He would pretend that it did. "I responded to your call, sir. The forward mustering room was a bit...dissolved."

"I'll make this simple, David. Your tests are coming back well. You could be fit for service again."

"Is that my name?" He recognized the flavor of Epsilon's anger, hotter and quicker than his own, a flash in the pan instead of a slow boil.

"Our work will not be about which name you take," the Director said, dismissive and arch. "How do you think you would do if you faced Agent Maine now? Under...controlled conditions, of course."

"I won't do that," the man said. His head felt hollow, but it was a reassuring simplicity, a clear path to wherever he would go next. He had been cleansed - and it hurt like someone had scraped the inside of his skull. He tracked back like a sleeper remembering the previous days and just got glimpses of pain, his own and Epsilon's, and someone's gun lying in the melting snow -

He had read about rampancy, how it should take seven years for an AI to dissolve into its component thoughts. Instead, the fragments were seven spirits for seven years.

He said, "Not if it's controlled."

They looked at one another for a long moment.

"The ship is sinking," the man said. "The glacier is carrying it west."

"I know. This is not our only facility."

Our. And now he knew that the Director had - or wanted him to think he had - other bases for himself, places which he would not yet let his agents locate.

"I wish to recover my assets. You were Agent Washington, and you could remain him."

As he had many times in this conversation and this week, with rote effort, the man remembered himself and his fabricated place. More than anything else he wanted to ask to where the Alpha had been moved, but that would be an unforgivable tell. He let his voice crack and his chin dip toward his chest. "I...I think that would help me," he said.

The director's voice had gone tight and steely, perhaps in sympathetic mirroring of the other man's outburst of openness. "Many agents have stolen my equipment and fled. They are...significant losses, Agent Washington. You could be in charge of the group which recovers them."

Group? Where was he getting these people? He felt that the last few days of his doubled life, the crude surgeries and cruder interrogations, must have traumatized the whole universe. Everyone would have to know, now.

No one did.

The Director said, "Where else would you want to go?"

"Oh, I have many places I want to go. Sunny islands, restaurants with umbrellas in the drinks. This has been a real pleasure cruise, but the scenery's getting boring."

The Director frowned.

His agent was on a roll now. "The problem with all those places is that they're not going to be so pretty soon. Because there are a lot of aggressive AI out there. So, Director, I have some rules."

If the outburst had surprised the Director, he did not show it with a change in expression. Perhaps he, too, was burnt out and did not have time for such things as personal rebellion.

"No more leader boards. No more scores. I won't pit my people against each other." This would show that he did not understand or care about the initial purpose of the board. The experiment would not continue any longer, of course.

Leonard Church nodded. "Agent South made some similar requests."

It took a moment to remember who South was, to unlock one of the two deadbolts in what the armored man now saw as a geometric mental landscape both behind and inside him.

The man said, "Other than that? Do what you want." He shrugged, meant it.

The Director nodded again. He was still wearing those glasses, hiding the synthetic-looking green eyes.

The man in the armor said, "Fine."

It was strange to say that, because the man was always honest. But a gun was also honest. A long wait was also honest.

* * *

Slowly, Wash brought his name back to himself.

He had shied away from it. It represented a halvedness which he did not want to feel.

* * *

The Recovery team was a lot of running at first, running to regain the muscle and weight he had lost. He listened to music that staggered and broke and staggered again.

The further he moved, the longer he could wait.

* * *

A long time later, after he had not thought of it in so long that he αlmost felt stable again, someone else looked at the tumbled interior of the meticulous house in his head.

Alpha wαs a bubbly, carbonated blot of personality. Wash had gotten used to seeing him in the Blue Army's fabricated body, even if he couldn't adopt the others' habit of calling him Church; every time he said the name it felt disingenuous. After he figured it out, though, he both knεw that he had to protect Alpha and that Alpha would throw itself into every fire it could find.

That was consistent with the Director that Wash had known.

The fight against the Meta was far too close to an uncontrolled circumstance for his liking - for all thαt he leaned on control, the Director's eye in the sky avatar was appropriate and frightening. It wasn't much of a fight, anyway - not in close quarters against the Brute shot, not against the pure size of him and Alpha riding mind-drunk and εxultαnt.

Alpha didn't replace Epsilon, didn't fill the same spaces and open the same wounds.

Wαsh would have bεen glad to be rid of the loud, obtrusive presence if he hadn't been too busy hurting and mourning.

Wash's nightmares came true so often that it was almost boring.

* * *

**/Alpha?\\**

* * *

He didn't relapse.

It wouldn't have been entirely possible for him to relapse into another person's personality, to rebuild the broken mind out of sickness and mnemophagy alone. There was not enough life in electrical signals alone for that.

Not completely.

He felt like he had traded one Director for another, though, when he stood in front of the Chairman, the enemy of his enemy, and agreed to kill for a new cause.

The cause which lead him back to the wreckage-strewn snow. When he desperately tried to wrest the capture unit away from the Meta, recognition of the machinery that had partially destroyed his mind was not the top priority on his list. Epsilon had sealed Wash up, closed him off from what he had felt before, and Wash was just returning the favor._ No offense. It's nothing personal._

The unit didn't belong to him now anyway, if it ever had. It had killed Tex, it had witnessed the death of the Meta (and might in some sightless machine way remember that too)

Relief was flooding him, too. Not in a 'it's Church's problem now' way, although there was some of that. Instead, he felt now that Epsilon had been consumed by the Alpha, that it had finally gone home.

Wash also felt bruised and angry and as if a UNSC-emblazoned spotlight had just turned on him, if he was being honest.

Hε always was.


End file.
